Marketing is exhausting

Launching a book for the first time is hard work.

Writing it is only the first step. Once it’s written, there’s rounds upon rounds upon rounds of edits. Honestly, you could edit your book forever. So another step is to know when to stop.

If you’re self-publishing, like I am, you can choose to pay for professional editing. I chose not to. I wrote the book with the help of absolutely invaluable critique partners who really helped shape it. Without them it would be a much different (and not nearly as good) book. So it was in decent shape to start with, and I’m now relying on beta readers to help me buff it to a shine.

While I wait for most of the betas to get back to me, I am working on editing based on the first beta’s comments. Which were awesome, but definitely more work than I was expecting.

And I’m also trying to get all my marketing in place. This is basically a full time job. Like I should be taking time off from my day job to focus on this, it’s that time consuming. Here’s what I have done so far:

-Create a website
-Add your book to Goodreads
-Create an author profile on Goodreads
-Create a Twitter account
-Create a Facebook page/account
-Hire a cover artist
-Hire a marketing coordinator
-Upload to Amazon so you have a pre-order button
-Create an author page on Amazon
-Create promotional graphics for Facebook and Twitter
-Join Goodreads and Facebook groups to promote the book
-Started working on a mailing list
-Permission to use song lyrics (this is a blog post in itself!)

Here’s what I still have to do:

-Finish editing
-Create ARCs
-Send out ARCs to individual (non-blog) reviewer friends
-Obtain cover art from artist
-Upload final version to Amazon
-Continue promoting on social media
-Finish the mailing list (create landing page)
-Come up with some exclusive content for the mailing list
-Blog tour during the first week after release
-Thank God for the marketing coordinator that’s handling the review copies and the blogs. If I had to personally reach out to every blog and ask them to review my book I’m pretty sure I would explode. Worth the money to save my sanity, and hopefully it will get me in front of enough eyes that I can re-coop what I spent.

And then of course there’s the whole writing part of this gig. I have a WIP that’s being sorely neglected, and a holiday short story that I’ve barely even started that I need to finish writing by the end of the month.

Here’s the thing though: I love this. I really do wish I could do it full time. I don’t know if that will ever happen for me, but I’m sure going to try.